Detroit Free Press Sports Writer

The previous time the Lions coached the Senior Bowl, they looked around their room and saw a lot they didn’t like.

“There were guys there that we looked at, and we’re like, ‘We won’t draft him, we won’t draft him, or him,’ and that was how it went,” general manager Martin Mayhew said. “This time, we went into it open-minded, and there were just a bunch of guys that we really liked.”

Maybe it was because the Lions coached a South team stocked with players from the talent-laden Southeastern Conference, a junior NFL conference that produced 63 draft picks this year.

“There may be something to that,” Mayhew said wryly. “The South team’s usually pretty stacked.”

Or maybe it was because the game, now run by executive director Phil Savage, the former GM of the Cleveland Browns, attracted better talent in general. A total of 94 players that played in the game or took part in Senior Bowl practices were drafted.

The Lions took three players they coached in Mobile, Ala., this year — the Raiders, who coached the North team, took two — and bucked their trend of little public contact with players they drafted overall.

First-round pick Ziggy Ansah of BYU played for Lions coaches in the Senior Bowl, as did third-rounder Larry Warford and seventh-rounder Michael Williams.

Williams and Appalachian State punter Sam Martin traveled to Allen Park for predraft visits. Neither player was invited to the NFL combine, so the Lions had to bring them in for physicals.

The Lions signed two more players as undrafted free agents who visited Allen Park, offensive tackle LaAdrian Waddle and running back Steven Miller, and a third, Central Michigan receiver Cody Wilson, took part in their local workout.

The ever-secretive Mayhew cautioned not to read too much into his team’s sudden public displays of affection.

“It just goes that way sometimes,” he said Saturday.

Coaches, of course, prefer to have as much contact as possible with players leading up to the draft.

“There’s a lot of guys that you look at in the draft that you watch film on, you interview them, you talk to them, and you give them a grade, but you never have worked with them,” tight ends coach Bobby Johnson said. “You maybe went to their workout, and you put them through a couple drills. I put a real high value on guys I can get my hands on for a week like we did in the Senior Bowl. I think that’s a great opportunity for us as coaches to work with those guys.”

(Page 2 of 2)

That’s how Johnson got to know Williams, a mauling tight end from Alabama who he said proved to be a tireless worker with a sizable football IQ and who asked all the right questions during meetings and practices.

The Lions also spent invaluable time with Ansah, their first-round pick and a player many pundits felt was the biggest boom-or-bust prospect at the top of the draft.

Ansah played just three years of football after leaving Ghana for BYU in 2008 and made nine career starts in college. But after Lions coaches spent seven hands-on days with the raw but talented prospect, they knew he would be in the mix to go No. 5 overall.

They saw his work habits, they learned how quickly he could pick up schemes in the classroom and apply them to the field, and Mayhew saw enough nuances in his game that convinced him Ansah wasn’t the Dave Kingman-type hit-or-miss prospect he said before the draft he wanted to avoid.

“I think if we hadn’t gone through the Senior Bowl, if we hadn’t worked with the kid, I might have been a little more concerned about it,” Mayhew said. “But having been there, having worked with him, our coaches felt very comfortable with it, and I felt comfortable with it.”